Hi group, Had my system offline for about 36 hours to try out fai (on a different drive). After this period, sunday evening, already late, I reconnected my original drive, started the server and watched the connection coming up. Many, many mails were downloaded (thanks to this fine group, :-) and almost immediately, my server became irresponsive. I managed to squeeze in and run top which came on after three minutes and saw my load increase from 20 to 30 to 50 to 77.81. I had a few exim processes and _lots_ of amavis processes running. My server started killing processes (out of memory) and I decided to power down (using the button, nothing else worked). I think I know what went wrong: there was no limit of running exim processes. Each process started amavis to scan for viruses and my server came to a dead stop. I disabled amavis and my mail came right through. Apparently, delivery _is_ limited because I had only one spamassassin running from my user's procmail at a time.
Two (groups of) questions: 1. What can I do when my server overloads like this? Logging in was _very_ difficult or not possible (timeout of 60 seconds on login prompt...) 2. How do I limit the number of exim processes? Exim is run from inetd and the infopages showed me that smtp_accept_max will not work. Is this indeed a problem? Should I run exim as a separate daemon and enable smtp_accept_max (or keep it at default 20, better than no limit...)? Is every server which runs exim from inetd vulnerable to this (whether deliberate or not) DoS attack? Thanks! David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
